Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, Updated with a New Preface and Epilogue

In this updated edition of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, anthropologist Seth Holmes examines the lives, suffering, and resistance of Mexican migrants in our contemporary food system, highlighting the ways in which market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. He also includes a new epilogue that updates the stories of the book's protagonists and their involvement in movements for Indigenous immigrant rights, farmworker rights, and the right to health.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 328 pages
Publication date: 28 November 2023
Publisher: University of California Press

This updated edition of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, with a new preface and a new epilogue co-written by Jorge Ramirez-Lo pez, provides an intimate examination of the everyday lives, suffering, and resistance of Mexican migrants in our contemporary food system. Seth Holmes, an anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, demonstrates how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. Holmes was invited to trek clandestinely through the desert into Arizona and was jailed with his companions before they were deported. He lived with Indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the United States, planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, and accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals. This "embodied anthropology" deepens our theoretical understanding of the ways in which social inequities come to be perceived as normal and natural in society and in health care. In a new epilogue, Holmes and Indigenous Oaxacan scholar Jorge Ramirez-Lopez provide a substantive update about the protagonists in the book, focusing on the ways in which they have been involved individually and collectively in movements for Indigenous immigrant rights, farmworker rights, and the right to health over the last decade.

Weight: 466g
Dimension: 152 x 228 x 22 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780520398634